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Today brought yet another impressive U.S. employment report from the Labor Department, with an unexpectedly high 213,000 new jobs added in the month of June (versus the expected 195,000).

But the report includes a particularly impressive number after nearly a decade of people just giving up on working during the Obama era malaise. Over 600,000 Americans decided that the market is so hot that they got off the sidelines and entered the game:

The increase in the unemployment rate came due to a rise in the labor force participation rate, which increased 0.2 percentage points to 62.9 percent as 601,000 people came off the sidelines and re-entered the labor force.”

Continuing the sports analogy, The Wall Street Journalnotes that what we’re witnessing is a different kind of ballgame under the Trump Administration than the unprecedented economic sluggishness that characterized the Obama “expansion”:

Steady hiring and low unemployment shows the labor market continues to be an area of strength for the economy since the recession ended nine years ago. What might be different now is that other aspects appear to be picking up steam. Some economists project economic output rose at better than 4% annually in the second quarter for the first time since 2014.

Rising consumer spending, manufacturing output and exports are expected to have contributed to the gain, set to be officially reported later this month. If sustained, that would be a turn from much of the expansion in which hiring has been consistent, but growth has been sluggish, holding near a 2% annual rate. One explanation is wages. Even though Americans were finding jobs, scant raises left them with little room in their budgets to step up spending.”

It’s amazing what an economic agenda of tax cuts and deregulation can do for an economic cycle that was supposedly on weary legs and amid an era of “secular stagnation” when solid growth was a thing of the past.

In our latest Liberty Update, we note how the U.S. has quickly reclaimed its position as the world’s most competitive economy under President Trump after slipping under Barack Obama. This image vividly illustrates one point we highlight – that for the first time ever, the number of job openings exceeds the number of unemployed Americans in the workforce to fill them:

From the always-insightful Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal in his latest “Business World” commentary:

Mr. Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, cares about good policy. That hasn’t been the rule for years. During the Obama era, tech and telecom policy were driven by White House interest in whipping up millennials and exploiting public hostility to cable providers.”

During the Obama years, when we endured the worst cyclical economic “recovery” in recorded U.S. history, we were told that the 3% economic growth to which we’d become accustomed since measurement began was a thing of the past, and that “secular stagnation” was the order of the future. Well, in just the first year of the Trump presidency, a funny thing happened:

Since World War II, the U.S. economy has averaged 3.3% growth per year. Under Barack Obama, we never even hit 3%, instead averaging below 2%. His apologists rationalized that “secular stagnation” had made 3% an unattainable goal, but both quarters under President Trump have already averaged over 3%. So like clockwork, leftists attempt to credit Obama for something they claimed was no longer possible:

On multiple measures, the economic “recovery” under Barack Obama was the worst in recorded U.S. history, due to his policies of more regulation, higher taxes and administrative fiat. The most consecutive months of unemployment above 8% (despite promising that his trillion-dollar spending “stimulus” would prevent it from exceeding 8% at all). The worst deficits in history, and the most debt in history. The first time that we never reached even 3% economic growth in a year (the post-World War II average was 3.3%). And so on.

Now here’s another. The worst record of new business creation following a recession.

Obama Economic Record

Keeping in mind that most new jobs are created by new businesses, that explains a lot.

The Gallup Job Creation Index rose to +37 in March from +35 in February. This is the third month in a row the index has hit a new record high after remaining relatively flat for much of 2016. Since the start of the year, the index has already increased by four points — the same increase seen throughout all of 2016.”

Obama blamestormed Bush for eight years while the U.S. economy and employment conditions stagnated, but as Syrian dictator Bashad al-Assad learned this week, there’s a new sheriff in town and he appears to be achieving quick results.

In our Liberty Update commentary last week, we noted the many failures of Barack Obama as president over the past eight years. Today, as the nation celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a Washington Post-ABC News survey shows just how disastrously race relations have declined under his watch:

In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 63 percent of Americans think race relations are ‘generally bad.’ Shortly after Obama took office, that number was 22 percent. In the same time period, those who think race relations are ‘generally good’ plummeted from 66 percent to 32 percent.”

Of his failures and disastrous legacy, this may be the most depressing.

There may be no commentator more exposed and discredited in recent years than The New York Times’s Paul Krugman.

Where to even begin? My personal favorite might be his call for a massive spending “stimulus” when Obama entered office, which he estimated should be approximately $600 billion, to return economic health to the nation. “When I put this all together,” he said, “I conclude that the stimulus package should be at least 4% of GDP, or $600 billion.” Obama ended up getting something much larger, closer to $1 trillion. Yet when the U.S. proceeded to suffer the worst decade of economic performance in U.S. history and multiple failed “recovery summers,” Krugman just shamelessly published a later piece entitled “How Did We Know the Stimulus Was Too Small?”

Fast forward to election night, when he moped and went on record predicting that markets would never recover from Donald Trump’s victory. You can’t make this stuff up:

It really does now look like President Donald Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear. Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

Remember back in 2008, when the unemployment rate stood essentially where it stands this year, the deficit over the preceding seven years was a tiny fraction what it has been over the past seven years, and liberals were acknowledging how great the economy was?

This is hardly exhaustive, but it provides a rough illustration of why Obama, his apologists and the political left skate on thin ice when they attempt to trumpet their economic performance.

In our recent Liberty Update commentary “Obama Didn’t Save the Economy, He Subdued It,” we noted the depressing fact that the current cyclical economic “recovery” under Obama is the worst since accurate recordkeeping began after World War II.

It was the third consecutive quarter of falling productivity, the longest streak since 1979. Productivity in the second quarter was down 0.4% from a year earlier, the first annual decline in three years. That was further down from an already tepid average productivity growth of 1.3% in 2007 through 2015, itself just half the pace seen in 2000 through 2007, and the trend shows little sign of reversing… Productivity is a key ingredient in determining growth in wages, prices and overall economic output.”

And the culprit? As The Wall Street Journal notes, “The slowdown in recent quarters has likely been reinforced by weak business investment in new equipment, software and facilities that could help boost worker efficiency.” Of course, that’s what tends to happen when an administration saddles the economy with record levels of regulation and makes no real advance toward finally reducing the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate.

Perhaps nothing better represents Obama’s record of failure better than Russia, where he and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bungled their infamous “Reset” attempt. For all of its efforts to placate Vladimir Putin to the detriment of U.S. allies like Poland and Ukraine, a new Gallup survey shows that Russians’ approval of U.S. leadership has fallen to a record low of 1%:

Just 1% of Russians approved of U.S. leadership in 2015 – the worst rating in the world last year, and the lowest approval Gallup has measured for the U.S. in the past decade. Remarkably, this is even worse than their previous record low 4% approval in 2014.”

It’s as if Obama and Clinton should receive commemorative shirts reading, “I Caved to Russian Dictators and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.” Regardless, neither Obama nor Clinton can claim a single substantive foreign policy success during their tenures. It’s again something to keep in mind as the administration pursues its inexplicable goal of surrendering U.S. Internet oversight before he coasts into retirement and leaves the rest of us to deal with the consequences.

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight the falsity of the persistent claim that Barack Obama somehow prevented a great depression:

[T]he federal government’s own economic data shows that Obama actually inherited an emerging recovery. The American economy was already rebounding before he even officially became president. What he has done is impose policies that have resulted in the slowest decade of economic growth in recorded U.S. history.”

Yesterday’s official report on first-quarter 2016 economic performance provided same-day confirmation. More specifically, the U.S. Commerce Department announced that gross domestic product (GDP), the basic metric by which the economy is measured and by which recessions and recoveries are defined, grew at a disturbing 0.5%. Not only is that number alarmingly low, it amounts to the worst mark in two years. Echoing our own commentary, The Wall Street Journalemphasizes how this places Obama’s legacy in perspective:

The reality is that the first quarter is further evidence of what has been the weakest economic expansion in the postwar era. The 0.5% growth is subject to revision but it follows 1.4% in the fourth quarter. Growth over the last six months has averaged about 1%, and under 2% over the last 12 months… The American economy hasn’t grown by more than 3% since 2005 (3.3%), the longest such stretch of malaise that we can find in the Bureau of Economic Analysis tables going back to 1930. Even the Great Depression saw a snapback to rapid growth from 1934-1936.”

The explanation for that is simple. Obama has pursued the most hyper-regulatory, big-government, wasteful-spending economic policy in U.S. history. That’s illustrated among other things by his horrific deficit record, which saw four consecutive deficits in excess of $1 trillion dollars, and more accumulated debt than all previous presidents combined. Until America has a president and Congress that pursue the proven supply-side policies that result in economic prosperity (see, e.g., Ronald Reagan), this will likely remain the new normal.

Now 140 years later, the Obama Administration continues its counterproductive and legally dubious effort to regulate the Internet as if it were little more than an old-fashioned telephone service of the Bell variety. CFIF and other free-market groups have consistently opposed that effort, and courts have repeatedly rebuked the Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) various schemes to impose it.

Today, The Wall Street Journal’s “Information Age” columnist Gordon Crovitz details how a Senate committee has discovered evidence that the Obama Administration’s behavior in attempting to regulate the Internet as an old-fashioned utility violated the law. In fact, even FCC regulators expressed shock at the degree to which their administrative independence was disregarded:

FCC staffers cited nine areas in which the last-minute change violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires advance public notice of significant regulatory changes. Agency staffers noted ‘substantial litigation risk.’ A media aide warned: ‘Need more on why we no longer think record is thin in some places.’ These emails are a step-by-step display of the destruction of the independence of a regulatory agency… Mr. Obama’s edict resulted in 400 pages of slapdash regulations the agency’s own chief economist dismissed as an ‘economics-free zone.'”

Here’s why it matters in the real world, in terms of economics and innovation: Crovitz notes that in just one year since Obama’s edict was imposed, “regulatory uncertainty has led to a collapse in investment in broadband.” As CFIF has also detailed, he is correct in that unfortunate observation.

On a more encouraging note, however, Obama’s latest attempt to regulate the Internet in ObamaCare fashion is back before the same appellate court that has twice rebuked it on this issue. As Crovitz wryly observes, “The Senate report should make fascinating reading for the federal appellate judges considering whether to invalidate the regulations… The appeals court has plenty of evidence proving White House meddling with a supposedly independent agency.”

For the good of American consumers and continuing Internet innovation, we certainly hope so.